Rehmat Noor has come to realise in her old age that blood is actually thinner than water. The 72-year-old lives in a small house in the Dhair Mond village in Talagang, but her plight has yet to move the powers-that-be into action.

“My niece wants to throw me out of the house,” she complains feebly, her fragile frame trembling with each word. The senior maintains that she regularly suffers domestic abuse at her niece’s hands, who lives next door.

“She would often slap me or push me. But about a week ago, she hit me with a large stick and cracked open my head,” she tells Dawn.

Following the attack, Ms Noor said she went to a rural health centre (RHC) in Tamman village.

“The doctor told me he could not treat me without a police report. But when I went to the police station in Tamman, all my pleas fell on deaf ears,” she says.

From the RHC, she was first referred to the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital in Talagang, then the District Headquarters Hospital in Chakwal. At the DHQ, doctors buried her in paperwork, making her wait four days for treatment to a head injury that could have become life-threatening.

Ms Noor was married to a man from her village, but he divorced her after 30 years because she could no longer bear children. She now lives as a widow, dependent on handouts from her villagers.

Dawn reached out to her family to verify Ms Noor’s version of events. Her niece refused to comment, but the niece’s son admitted that the old woman was being subjected to domestic abuse.

“Women quarrel all the time, what’s wrong with that,” he said.

Tamman SHO Safdar Hussain told Dawn that Ms Rehmat Noor did not come to the police station. “She might have visited a police picket in Miyal village,” he said, promising to look into the matter.

Dawn’s ‘Eye-Witness Account’ segment features accounts of individuals who have experienced adversity or have been affected by a miscarriage of justice. All accounts are verified as far as possible by Dawn’s editorial team. Readers are encouraged to send in accounts of similar incidents that may have befallen them, so that attention can be called to such problems and they can be addressed with due debate in the public eye. Readers can send their accounts to re.isb@dawn.com.

Published in Dawn, April 1st, 2015

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